Achieve your career breakthrough—and the pay bump that comes with it—with the strategies of these trailblazers

Kirban experienced this one-upmanship firsthand, which is why he’s glad Rampolla stayed on his heels over the past decade. “If you don’t have competition, you start to sit back,” he says.

So who are you going to outperform? If you don’t know yet, set your sights on a colleague who’s a couple of levels above you on the organizational chart. “You need to be looking out in front,” Cardone says. “Don’t look at the desk next to you. That’s not the guy.”

Figure out what you can do to prove you’re better, and then do it over and over. The quicker you can make the other guy superfluous, the sooner you can take his office.